design observations

Aggravating Design

This Labor Day weekend (2023), Minnesota is experiencing some record-breaking heat. Yesterday, it got up to 97 degrees F. Today, it’s expected to reach 96. In the interest of avoiding the hottest part of the day, Hubby and I headed out in mid-morning to run errands. While on the drive to the storage unit we are renting, we were listening to 1A on Minnesota Public Radio. The conversation was with Mark Ellison, a carpenter who…

Continue reading

design home product packaging products

Can Opener #642

I have a gripe. My husband shares it with me. Might you have the same gripe? Why can’t a can opener last more than a few months? Over our 3-decades plus marriage, we have gone through countless can openers. We’ve tried cheap ones. We’ve tried expensive ones. All seem to fail by not properly cutting the top off a can or by falling apart. Our latest can opener was from Ikea. Compared to the previous…

Continue reading

art design family fiber art home work in progress

Cheering Up the Bathroom

Painting in the new house continues.  A couple of weekends ago, we decided to erase the gray in the small first-floor bathroom, which is just a half-bath. You could call it a powder room if anyone used powder in there, but we don’t. There’s white wainscoting in the bathroom and a white cabinet, which we quite liked. We wanted to cheer up the bathroom, so we picked a bright yellow. Because the bathroom is so…

Continue reading

art design family home projects work in progress

Designing Around an Iceberg

Hubby and I put the (almost) finishing touches on the dining room yesterday. All the walls were gray, gray, gray, and the floor was a darker gray. We wanted to carry our blue theme from the living room into the dining room without making it matchy-matchy. When we were searching for a house, we knew we needed a couple of large walls, one for a giant mid-century room divider and one for a giant iceberg.…

Continue reading

design observations product packaging

Your Child WILL Defeat This Lock

It’s been a while since I’ve found product packaging that strikes me as strange or curious enough to share, but I recently ran across something that fits the bill. A child safety lock, the type that is plastic and loops over a couple of cupboard knobs to keep them held shut, contained packaging language that made me question why anyone would buy the product. The text on the back of the package, reproduced in the…

Continue reading